munlun-the-bard

[munlun-the-bard]

“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”

— ERIN BOW

[munlun-the-bard]

YOU ARE GORGEOUS

YOU ARE WORTHY OF PLATONIC AND/OR ROMANTIC LOVE

YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT ELSE YOU'RE WORTHY OF??

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

*throws a dollar at you*

THAT'S RIGHT.

fourteen dollar

[munlun-the-bard]

 I got a couple of movies from Netflix and they had these cool Halloween-themed mailers. Maybe I’m easily amused, but they’re kind of nifty!

[munlun-the-bard]

I am small and I can't do very much. That is the despair of an individual in a big and violent world. But the plants teach me it is okay to be small. Everything is either small, or made of things that are small. We are all connected. Symbiosis.

So, on the subject of bugs.

It is the fourth summer of the Meadow. My plants grow strong and wild and cover more space than ever before. I have worked to eradicate the invasive lawn grass and carefully curate large clumps of only native species (with a few esteemed naturalized weeds allowed---I have no quarrel with Chicory, it has a positive effect on the ecosystem).

I have tall, huge native Field Thistles, multitudes of tough and aggressive evening primrose, wild strawberry spreading everywhere, a dozen vigorous gray-headed coneflowers, giant clumps of cup-plant, and so many asters and goldenrods that I've had to start targeting them in my weeding.

Yes, yes, I have the showy ones like purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans, but I also encourage and cultivate weird little weeds that are too inconspicuous or ugly to be often planted on purpose. White avens, lanceleaf frogfruit, nettle-leaf vervain.

There are too many plants. I'll spend forever listing them all. What is really interesting, is what's happened with the bugs.

Every year, there has been a much bigger variety and population of insects. I am both seeing many more species, and seeing the same species in much, much larger numbers. Even on the same plants that were already there 4 years ago, I can see way more bugs.

Flower flies, for instance. There are tiny yellow and black flies known as flower flies that are very beneficial for gardeners, because their larvae are predators that attack aphids. It used to be that I could often see a dozen, but now I see hundreds of them every time I go outside!

Or wasps. There are more species of wasps than I possibly could have imagined. It used to be that I would only see the reddish paper wasps, the ones that make big paper nests in the eaves of your house, but now, there are dozens of different wasps. Some are black, others black and white, others black and yellow, others black and brown, and they come in all different sizes. A bunch of blue-black wasps with white stripes live in the log next to my pond.

I identified them and looked up the species, and they had not been studied at all since the 1960's. Supposedly they are solitary species, but several different wasps have made nests inside the log right next to each other. That's the first interesting thing. The second interesting thing is that the nests were first inhabited last summer, and the same species of wasp still lives in them, so their town has been inhabited for multiple years instead of being abandoned when the larvae emerge. Has the next generation taken over the old nests? I am observing something about the species that is not known to science.

Wasps are hated and feared, but my wasps have never been anything but peaceful and polite, and they have so much beauty and importance in the ecosystem.

And the bees! I am observing bees this year that I had never even heard of before. Many of them are so tiny, I doubt they could even reach the nectar in large flowers like purple coneflower. What if the small, inconspicuous flowers are essential for smaller pollinators like the tiny bees? That would make sense. Different flowers evolved to attract different bees.

Beetles, ants, leafhoppers, flies, moths, butterflies, all kinds of bugs. Specific plants attract specific bugs, but it is not the plants individually that restore insect biodiversity, it is the way the plants interact and form a bigger ecosystem.

What I mean is, as my garden grew, the increase in bugs was not linear in relationship to the plants, it was exponential. The combination of the many different plants into an ecosystem attracted many more bugs than would be expected from the sum of each plant individually.

I remember the emptiness and barrenness before. I see it around me when I visit other places. The disappearance of bugs. The insect apocalypse. It's so clear to me now. The cause is biotic homogenization. I call it plant sameness.

Everywhere around me, landscapes have been made into expanses of the same few plants. But when plant sameness is replaced by variety and diversity, many plants interacting in many different ways, everything changes.

[munlun-the-bard]

Because sometimes we all just need to see a guy head-bump a beautiful Beluga whale

[munlun-the-bard]

Say what you want to about the X-Men movies, but Rogue telling Logan he should wear a seat belt and him scoffing at her only to immediately be thrown through the front windshield was the most Wolverine™️ thing that could have possibly happened.

[munlun-the-bard]

I was more or less stunned by what had happened. I had been prepared for criticism and ridicule - I was accustomed to them. But it had never occurred to me that people might want to hound and persecute me for my change in role. I had lived as a woman because that was my social standing, and had been made fun of and called 'half-man', and now when I had faced the situation and righted the grotesquely false position in which I had lived so long, it seemed that the public would damn me because I had once, perforce [by force, by necessity], worn skirts. I tried to get other hospital work. I went to the men who had been my chiefs and told them the truth and asked their aid in securing another position; to a man they turned me down. I tried to get other sorts of work and failed tor the same reason as soon as I gave my name. Then my family employed counsel and instituted proceedings to have my name legally changed; and the medical school from which I had been graduated served notice on us that if we persisted they would rescind my diploma and have me disbarred from practice.

— excerpt from Letter from Alan Hart to Mary Roberts Rinehart, August 3, 1921, on the subject of his transition from female to male and the impact of being publicly outed by a woman who recognized him. Alan Hart was one of the first men to get a hysterectomy in the US, and pioneered the use of X-rays in the diagnosis of tuberculosis, which ended up being crucial to treatment as the disease was asymptomatic early on.

[munlun-the-bard]

Hydration Elixir

Okay, so, it's about to get Hot and Humid in the USA, so I'mma spring my tried-and-tested Hydration Elixir! For this recipe you will need:

Salt

Lemons

Water

Warning: DO NOT drink Hydration Elixir by itself! This is an elixir meant to be mixed in small quantities with a regular-sized glass or bottle of water! You're making the equivalent of a family supper-sized quantity of elixir, not an individual meal.

Instructions:

Step 1: Take a lemon, cut it in half, and juice it.

(Substitute Step 1: In the event of no lemons or inability to juice one, measure out a quarter cup of lemon juice.)

Step 2: Set lemon juice to side.

Step 3: Boil approximately two cups of water, then mix in a generous teaspoon of salt. (note: boiling the water makes the salt dissolve fast with minimal stirring, and that is why we're doing it)

Step 4: Allow salted water to cool.

Step 5: Mix lemon juice into salted water (note: Mixing the juice and water together when the water is hot makes the whole thing taste worse later)

Step 6: Pour your newly-crafted elixir into a bottle or jar with a lid, then put in fridge to cool.

Directions on Use:

Add a teaspoon or so of Hydration Elixir to a larger glass or bottle of water when you have been sweating to help replace salt lost due to said sweat. The lemon juice adds some nice vitamins and a pleasant taste to make it all more palatable.

Use Hydration Elixir in moderation, you've just made enough to last you a week or so, with enough to share some around with friends. Quickly drinking a concoction that consists of two cups of water, a lemon's worth of juice, and a teaspoon of salt will clean out your innards but good, and you will survive but it will be with Regrets.

Again, Hydration Elixir is meant to be mixed with a large quantity of plain water. The recipe is as it is because it's easier to quantify how much of each ingredient (especially the salt) to use for a bulk batch and how much of the batch you should probably take than to give measurements for a single glass of the stuff.

Plus, if you've got it already made and chilling in the fridge, then you just need to plop a teaspoon into a glass of water when you've come in hot and sweaty and tired or mix some into your water bottle to take with you before you head out.

Stay safe and stay hydrated!

[munlun-the-bard]

Wealwell's coming for Van's gig! 🤸‍♂️🤸‍♂️🤸‍♂️

Watch this episode of Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho! on Dropout

[munlun-the-bard]

"In Northern California, a Native American tribe is celebrating the return of ancestral lands in one of the largest such transfers in the nation’s history.

Through a Dept. of the Interior initiative aiming to bring indigenous knowledge back into land management, 76 square miles east of the central stretch of the Klamath River has been returned to the Yurok tribe.

Sandwiched between the newly-freed Klamath and forested hillsides of evergreens, redwoods, and cottonwoods, Blue Creek is considered the crown jewel of these lands, though if it were a jewel it wouldn’t be blue, it would be a giant colorless diamond, such is the clarity of the water.

Pictured: Blue Creek

It’s the most important cold-water tributary of the Klamath River, and critical habitat for coho and Chinook salmon. Fished and hunted on since time immemorial by the Yurok and their ancestors, the land was taken from them during the gold rush before eventually being bought by timber companies.

Barry McCovey Jr., director of the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department, remembers slipping past gates and dodging security along Blue Creek just to fish up a steelhead, one of three game fish that populate the river and need it to spawn.

Profiled along with the efforts of his tribe to secure the land for themselves and their posterity, he spoke to AP about the experience of seeing plans, made a decade ago, come to fruition, and returning to the creek on which he formerly trespassed as a land and fisheries manager.

“To go from when I was a kid and 20 years ago even, from being afraid to go out there to having it be back in tribal hands … is incredible,” he said.

Part of the agreement is that the Yurok Tribe would manage the land to a state of maximum health and resilience, and for that the tribe has big plans, including restoring native prairie, using fire to control understory growth, removing invasive species, restoring native fish habitat, and undoing decades of land-use changes from the logging industry in the form of culverts and logging roads.

“And maybe all that’s not going to be done in my lifetime,” said McCovey. “But that’s fine, because I’m not doing this for myself.”

The Yurok Tribe were recently at the center of the nation’s largest dam removal, a two decades-long campaign to remove a series of four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River. Once the West Coast’s third-largest salmon run, the Klamath dams substantially reduced salmon activity.

Completed last September, the before and after photographs are stunning to witness. By late November, salmon had already returned far upriver to spawn, proving that instinctual information had remained intact even after a century of disconnect.

Pictured; Klamath River flows freely, after Copco-2 dam was removed in California

“Seeing salmon spawning above the former dams fills my heart,” said Joseph L. James, chairman of the Yurok Tribe, the leaders of the dam removal campaign along with the Karuk and Klamath tribes.

“Our salmon are coming home. Klamath Basin tribes fought for decades to make this day a reality because our future generations deserve to inherit a healthier river from the headwaters to the sea.”

Last March, GNN reported that the Yurok Tribe had also become the first of America’s tribal nations to co-manage land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding involving Redwoods National Park.

The nonprofit Save the Redwoods bought a piece of land adjacent to the park, which receives 1 million visitors annually and is a UNESCO Natural Heritage Site, and handed it over to the Yurok for stewardship.

The piece of land, which contained giant redwoods, recovered to such an extent that the NPS has incorporated it into the Redwoods trail network, and the two agencies will cooperate in ensuring mutual flourishing between two properties and one ecosystem.

Back at Blue Creek, AP reports that work has already begun clearing non-native conifer trees planted for lumber. The trunks will be used to create log jams in the creek for wildlife habitat.

Costing $56 million, the land was bought from the loggers by Western Rivers Conservancy, using a mixture of fundraising efforts including private capital, low interest loans, tax credits, public grants and carbon credit sales.

The sale was part of a movement called Land Back, which involves returning ownership of once-native lands of great importance to tribes for the sake of effective stewardship. [Note: This is a weirdly limited definition of Land Back. Land Back means RETURN STOLEN LAND, PERIOD.] Studies have shown around the tropics that indigenous-owned lands in protected areas have higher forest integrity and biodiversity than those owned by national governments.

Land Back has seen 4,700 square miles—equivalent to one and a half-times the size of Yellowstone National Park—returned to tribes through land buy-back agreements in 15 states." [Note: Since land buyback agreements aren't the only form of Land Back, the total is probably (hopefully) more than that.]

-via Good News Network, June 10, 2025

[munlun-the-bard]

A boatswain of many talents... including solving Brennan's puzzle by episode three! 🤯🤯🤯

Watch this episode of Dimension 20: Cloudward, Ho! on Dropout

[munlun-the-bard]

thinking about creatures.

[munlun-the-bard]

Technical team of the expedition ! I love the difference in physique between these three.

[munlun-the-bard]

Hey don't cry, okay? We just found Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, a species thought to be extinct for the past 60 years.

[munlun-the-bard]

[munlun-the-bard]

Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating

[munlun-the-bard]

Fun fact: the guys at our college’s geology department prop out the doors with their samples. I totally understand why but as someone whose work with samples is necessarily super delicate and sterile it fucks me up so bad